An oceon of tears

A design trio will celebrate the sea and highlight its battle with plastic pollution at this year’s Bloom

W
hen I meet Marion Keogh, Bernie Torpey and Una Thomas, the garden designers,
above, we spend a fair amount of time talking about nurdles. I’ve not heard
of them before, and I suspect most people reading this won’t have either,
but we’re going to be hearing a lot more about them in the future. Nurdles,
my friends, are all around us.

They are tiny pellets of plastic resin, less than 5mm in diameter, which are
used in factories all over the world to make plastic bags, containers,
bottles, furniture, pipes, toys and countless other products. They are so
tiny, they flow like water or grain and are easily shipped in drums and
tankers across oceans and over land. Their size also makes them nearly
impossible to capture if they escape — and escape they do, at all stages of
their journey from the pelletising machine to end product, through accidents
and